DIVINE INTERPOSITION IN HUMAN EMERGENCY.
By Austin Phelps
This title expresses a law of God's government. The first act of God for man after the fall was a supernatural intervention in an exigency which could have been met in no other way. The promise of the “seed of the woman” was the capital act which signalizes the whole subsequent history of the world. Standing at the head of the stream of human experience, it has infused its own character of eccentricity into the whole current of that experience. As sin creates an unbroken succession of emergencies and entanglements in human destiny, so redemption creates a corresponding succession of interpositions and rescues. This law of supernatural intervention is signally illustrated in the protection which God has given to the institutions of the gospel. The history of the gospel is a history of deliverances by invisible powers of that which to human view seems often to be a doomed cause. Philosophical expectations are all against its success. The balance of natural probabilities is never in its favor. The great forces of the world are its allied enemies. If it were true, as Murat said, that “it is the law of Providence to favor the strongest battalions,” Christianity ought long ago to have been numbered among the mythologies. We ought to find it in books of ancient fables. Its history is a riddle to statesmanship and philosophy alike, because it is a history of emergencies, from which truth has been rescued by a secret power, when all the visible causes of events seemed to insure its annihilation. This is illustrated, for instance, in that law by which persecution always defeats itself. It has become a truism (has it not?) that persecution never permanently injures a good cause. We never fear the ultimate effect of violence in an attempt to suppress a truth, to put down a good man, to destroy a good book, to crush any good thing. Why? It is not, as is often affirmed, that in the natural course of things truth in such a conflict is the superior. In such a world as this truth is not the superior. Under natural law the good never triumphs as a matter of course. It never rises by its own elasticity. Crises have often occurred in which persecution has been backed up by wealth, by learning, by the prestige of antiquity, by civil law, by public opinion, and by bayonets, by all the great forces which sway society and compact nations, and thus allied, it has borne down—upon what? Upon armies bristling with steel? Upon Ehrenbreitsteins and Cronstadts? No; upon a handful of poor men and friendless women and little children, who had no weapon of defense but prayer. The existence of Christianity has more than once hung in the balance of such a conflict as that. On which side, then, in the nature of things, were the chances of success? Leave out of account the law of supernatural intervention, and what wise man could foresee that impotence and strength would change places in the issue! Many times the success of persecution has seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Many times has its success appeared to be an accomplished fact. It has laughed at failure as a bugbear. Many times it has burnt up the handful of men, women, and children, as Alva did in the Netherlands. It has answered prayer with faggots. “We have them now,” said one of the “Blood Council,” “and God himself cannot save them.” Many times have even the people of God thought so. “We trusted that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel.” “Oh! yes, we did trust; but our trust has failed us, our enemies have triumphed, God has not interposed as we thought he would, we have now only to lie down and die.” It is often true that God has not interposed as men have believed he would. God is not partial to miraculous methods of working. He often seems to look on indifferently while fire and steel do their work on those who are as the apple of his eye. It has been said to be the great miracle of Providence that so often no miracles are necessary to accomplish his purposes. He does not find it needful or expedient to work very largely by hairbreadth escapes. His methods of procedure strike deeper than that. He strikes at persecution where it roots—in the underground of Satanic forces. The prayer of a dying child opens an armory which faggots cannot burn. The twelve legions of angels are given to it. Spiritual battalions crowd the air with their strategy, and soon to even our swollen eyes it appears that the success of persecution has been its failure. God has interposed in the emergency, but in his own way. He has caused violence to defeat itself, through the spiritual forces which it has roused to the rescue. The same truth is illustrated in that law by which infidelity on a large scale is always short-lived. There was a truth in the argument of Robespierre for the being of God, that “atheism was an aristocratic belief.” It is true of every variety of infidelity that sooner or later it contracts itself within the circle of a few minds. The masses of men never permanently embrace it. The history of infidelity proves this. It has been beaten so many times, in so many varieties, beneath such adroit disguises, under such diversities of circumstance, with such accumulations of disadvantage on the side of faith, popular opinion has so often spurned it, respectable opinion has so often become ashamed of it, that now we have settled upon this as one of the axioms of Christian policy, that infidelity cannot become the permanent belief of any people. The mania of suicide lurks in its blood. Sooner or later a secret power in the popular instinct of faith will creep around it in a circle of fire, and it will act the scorpion in the fable. This we believe simply because the history of unbelief is a succession of such deaths. It is always braying in some new form, and is always gasping in some old form. But why is it so? It is not because anything in the nature of the case defends the world from infidelity. On the contrary, human nature has elective affinities with infidelity. Men do not love to retain God in their thoughts. Atheism finds a den to hide in in every human heart. The practical life of the world is largely atheistic. So strong are the tendencies of sin to a dethronement of God that many thoughtful minds anticipate that the last conflict of Christianity with it in this world will be narrowed down to a struggle with atheism, naked and shameless. There have been periods when to human view the immediate prospects were overwhelmingly suggestive of this crisis. Times of transition have occurred, from an old to a new order of society, when the popular faith has seemed to break loose from the old moorings and to drift, nobody could tell whither. Simultaneously with this, infidelity has been greeted by the sympathy of the controlling minds of a nation. Universities and Royal Societies have nursed it; elegant literature has dandled it; poetry has sung to it; the sciences have disciplined and armed it; fashion has coquetted with it; philosophy has crowned it; wealth has built temples to it; philanthropy and liberty have brought incense to it from afar; and to the friends of Christ it has seemed that, if it were possible, the very elect would be drawn after it into the vortex of apostasy. Society, at such times, seems to have run mad with unbelief. What was Paris in 1789 and again in 1871 but one vast lunatic asylum? Respectable medical opinion thus explains the atheistic ferocity of the French metropolis. Now at such a crisis it is not on the ground of natural causes operating in known methods that we can anticipate the restoration of faith. Indeed, in such emergencies that restoration usually comes in ways which have not been anticipated. Sometimes God suffers infidelity to triumph for a while, and by its enormities to work out a popular recoil. A very brief experience of it under the secret overruling of the Holy Spirit is often enough to do that. Sometimes he permits it to run to seed in absurdities which he uses to awaken the sense of the ludicrous. Then the common sense of the world breaks out into a broad laugh at it. Sometimes he raises up one man, like Bishop Butler, whose life's work it is to bring back the cultivated mind of a nation to the conviction that belief in God is intellectually respectable. Sometimes a national affliction comes like an earthquake, and a national revival of religion follows it. Providence and grace delight in co-operation. They go forth at God's bidding, as the disciples did at the command of our Lord, the two together. Their compound forces become explosive to the solidity of error. The mass is rent by fissures which never close up again. In some such unlooked-for method God comes to the rescue and meets the emergency himself. Thoughtful men seem to themselves to be spectators, rather than actors. The same principle is illustrated in that law which forbids corruption within the church of Christ to reach the extreme of organic disease. If the wisest and best of men had fore-ordained the history of the church, they would have been apt to order events so that the church itself should have stood like an angel in the sun, pure as that purest of the elements. Men would have planned things so, because of an imagined necessity. We should have said it must be this or nothing. We should have reasoned on the problem of corruption in the body of Christ, as we reason upon gangrene in the physical body. Once pervasive, it is fatal. When spiritual disease has even balanced spiritual health in the church, it has been a perfectly natural inference that the last hour of the church was at hand. Looking cautiously into the surroundings of the French Deism of the last century and the French Atheism of to-day, we cannot but respect the sagacity of their champions in reasoning as they have done from the premise of the Papal church to the conclusion that Christianity must be near its end. If an effete and imbecile faith, the foe alike of learning, and liberty, and morality, be all that the Bible has to offer to a race of “wretches” such as Voltaire described mankind to be, it is reasonable to believe that the Bible will soon become an antiquarian rarity. Such logic is right if we reason only upon the assumption of such natural causes operating by such natural laws as are visible and calculable to our sagacity. But the church of Christ has already lived long enough to demonstrate to us that there is one of the points at which natural law opens secretly to invisible agencies, which come in noiselessly and work breathlessly. They are God's angels of reform. Precisely how, precisely where, precisely when they act, we do not know; but we see results which cannot be explained without them. We see decay arrested. We see the mass of corruption sloughed off. We see the dead limbs stirring. We feel the heart which, but just now gave no sign to our stethoscope, bounding with the pulse of a new life. God interposes by an alternation of moral surgery with moral restoratives to save his beloved from dying by organic disease. The same principle might be illustrated, if space would permit, from the history of local revivals of religion. These often excite in Christian observers the feeling of surprise. They often break out suddenly. They come in unexpected methods. They follow honored instruments. They develop power altogether disproportionate to the means employed. They often fall upon a slumbering church. They reach the forgotten classes of society. They compass results which even prayer had not foreseen. They override approved and established ways of preaching. Their first sign seems to be the undermining and the humbling of a revered and complacent pulpit. In ways which human ingenuity would never have thought of, God makes his own sovereignty felt in them. And in their timeliness they fit into emergencies in the religious life of a people which to human view could have been met by no other conceivable agencies or events. Such divine intervention is one of the favorite thoughts of prophecy. So has the church of Christ always found it to be one of the “precious thoughts” of God.—PROF. AUSTIN PHELPS, D. D., in Independent.